Monday, 31 October 2016

An article that looks at the Christian character of Halloween - All Hallows' Eve - as the vigil of All Saints Day. Discussing the influence of pagan Celtic practices, its secularisation, and the re-inculturation of what is in and of itself a Christian celebration.

Halloween is a centuries old Scottish abbreviation
of Allhallow-Even, Hallow E’en, or simply All Hallows’ Eve
– which means All Holy Eve or All Saints Eve: the eve
before All Hallows’ Day which is All Saints' Day. Halloween is thus the evening
celebration of the Solemnity of All Saints’ Day on which the Church
traditionally celebrates the souls of the blessed who are in heaven. This in turn is followed by All Souls’ Day, a day on
which the Church especially prays for all the souls who, having died in God’s
grace but who weren’t yet perfect to be able to enter the bliss of
beatitude, tarry in purgatory. The Church in continuum with Judaism, carries
the torch of this belief, which is part and parcel with a belief that through
prayers, penance, and alms giving the time of these souls’ purification can be
quickened. Halloween, All Saints, and All Souls together
form what is known as Allhallowtide, Hallowtide, Hallowmas
or the Day of the Dead or in Spanish Dia de los Muertos. A three-day
period dedicated to commemorating the dead.

The equivalent of All Saints’ Day was the 13th
May which was a day dedicated to celebrating the martyrs which we know was
at least somewhat commonplace before c.373 when St. Ephraim speaks of it. Sometime
between c.731-741, moving and expanding the scope of the May celebration, the 1st
November was dedicated by Pope Gregory III to a commemoration that celebrated
all the saints. “This date became popularly adopted as ‘All Saints Day’ in Ireland
and Britain.”[i]
A century later the commemoration was extended to a feast for the Western churches. The
vigil of All Saints’ Day or Halloween, is thus a 1300-year-old Christian
celebration that unfolds in a context of honouring the mortally dead – who are
alive in God (Rom 6:11; Mk 12:27) – in the eternity of heaven, or the
transitory realm of purgatory.

Eventually, as it is supposed, out of superstition that
the damned in hell would wreak havoc if they were not commemorated with their
own day, the Irish peasants began a custom of banging pots and pans on the 31st
October, Halloween – namely to ward off malign influence. Halloween, as a day
for those in hell – no doubt informed by their Celtic heritage if it is true –
was thus by no means an officially sanctioned or universal practice grounded in
what Halloween was, and as its name itself indicates: the eve of All Saints.

It is without a doubt that certain Halloween traditions
have drawn their influence from pagan Celtic traditions surrounding the end of
harvest festival called Samhain, which was celebrated from sundown of what
equates to the 31st October to sundown of the 1st
November.

During this festival, Celts
believed the souls of the dead-including ghosts, goblins and witches-returned
to mingle with the living. In order to scare away the evil spirits, people
would wear masks and light bonfires.

When the Romans conquered the
Celts, they added their own touches to the Samhain festival, such as making
centerpieces out of apples and nuts for Pomona, the Roman goddess of the
orchards. The Romans also bobbed for apples and drank cider[ii]

Wearing masks, lighting bonfires and carving turnip heads
in the form of the deceased were perhaps the most assailant customs adopted and
Christianised. The latter custom of which was translated into jack-o'-lanterns
– which were initially made from turnips in the British Isles, and from
pumpkins in the nineteenth century in the Americas, believed by some to help
ward away demonic spirits.

However, despite the influence certain Halloween customs have
drawn from ancient Celtic pagan customs, the principle beliefs that form the
heart of the celebration of All Saints and All Souls were in no way informed by
Celtic beliefs. Since the veneration of holy men and women, and praying for the
dead, are beliefs predating Christianity’s arrival in the European Continent
and British Isles. Nevertheless, they are beliefs inherited from Judaism, which
for centuries upon centuries held such beliefs as exampled by the awareness of
the power of God working through the relics of Elijah (2 Kings 13:21) and the
prayers and penances offered for the dead (2 Macc 12:44-45; 1 Sam 31:13; 2 Sam
1:12). Acts which were always considered wholly distinct from the forbidden
practice of divination – of seeking to summon and thus commune with the dead by
practices of the dark arts (Deut 18:10-11; Is 19:3).

Yet notwithstanding the fact that the beliefs of which All
Saints’ and All Souls’ Day were occasions of expressing, are
intrinsically Christian and non-pagan, it is not an indictment against
Christianity’s authenticity that certain pagan customs, and maybe even dates,
have been adopted to mark the Christian faith. In fact, it is quite the
opposite, since Christianity is culturally transcendent and yet, because of the
Mystery of the Incarnation, it is a faith which can wear the clothes of any
culture and which can adopt the system of patterns and symbols employed by any
given culture – provided false meanings are replaced with true meanings, and
unethical practices with ethically sound, but culturally congruent alternatives.
This is the dynamic process of inculturation.

By the 17th century various forms of Protestantism
had come to resist and/or reject certain beliefs which surrounded Halloween,
such as purgatory, praying for the dead, and 'outright veneration' of the saints.
Such resistance was fuelled by abhorrence for superstitions, yet the baby of
ancient doctrine ended up being thrown out with the bath water of superstition.
Without these positive-doctrines, Halloween, although generally celebrated, tended
in Protestant circles to increasingly emphasise the diabolic and the need to
ward against evil spirits. This hostility climaxed in 18th - 19th
century Puritan antagonism, especially in the Americas, against Catholicism and
its beliefs. Whereby Halloween was branded as an un-Christian celebration.

The initial separation of Halloween from Catholic/Ancient
Christian beliefs, followed by Puritanical rejection of the celebration of
traditional Christian celebrations from Christmas to Halloween, led in large
part to Halloween’s conceptual and practical divorce from an explicit Christian
context, thus slowly de-Christianising Halloween in a process of secularisation. A secularisation
which was reinforced by 19th century folklorists who extrapolated
the link between Halloween and pagan Celtic practices. And eventually capitalised
by greeting card companies from the 19th century onwards; who propagated
the occultist imagery of witches, ghosts and ghouls, which Halloween, torn from
its Catholic roots, came to be reduced to, and because of which, is largely
rejected as a diabolic occasion by many Christians.

Eucharistic 'Jack-O'-Lantern'

However, despite the form Halloween has been reduced to
today, it remains a deeply Christian celebration commemorating those who’ve
died in God’s favour. As such, as opposed to outright resistance and a
condemnation of what Halloween has become – an excuse to party, dress up, beg
for lollies, and revel in what is considered to be the fantasy of non-existent dark
forces – what is called for is a re-inculturation of Halloween, of All
Hallows’ Eve into Christian belief and practice. Some carry out this
re-inculturation by hosting parties where people dress up as saints – since
Halloween is literally in name, origin and date the eve of All Saints. In
Mexico many do so by holding mortality plays, and dressing up as skeletons or
rotting corpses, as a reminder of death and the necessity to live upright
lives. This is in similitude to the Danse Macarbe - French for the Dance of Death - which is a Medieval artistic genre, bearing influence to this day, involving depictions of the rotting or skeletal dead, who beckoned mortals to dance with them to the grave. Depictions which endeavoured to awaken people to their mortality, and thoughts of preparing for hereafter. (Read more here).

Hallows Eve': Bangladeshi Christians lighting candles on a headstone

There is also the medieval practice of attending
cemeteries to pray for the dead which is still carried on today, and the custom of distributing bread cakes – called ‘soul
cakes’ – which used to be handed out to those who knocked on the door, who in
turn would pledge to pray for the souls of their benefactor’s relatives.

These such customs can be adopted and adapted to today as
a means of being in the world, but not of the world; of being open to the seeds
of truth in all things, as opposed to being so vehemently hostile to what is
false that one closes themselves off to what is good and true, and thus come
to leave such specks of gold unharvested. Specks within our secular culture,
within the secular practice of Halloween, which can be extracted for the glory
of God and the salvation and relief of souls.

Thus whilst people throughout the
world light candles in hollowed pumpkins on this Halloween night for the sheer
sake of it, and perhaps some for awry ends; we might do the opposite. Perhaps with
a literal candle or lantern, or a fitting All Hallows' celebration of some sorts, to serve as a sign – but what really matters is spiritually, by keeping alight our hearts with prayer on this Hallows’ Eve – for
those traversing the mortal plains here below; for those in purgatory, and for
those who’ve made it to the Promised Land who can help us get there too.

It seems fitting to end this article on this start of the Day of the Dead, with the fifteenth century
anonymous poem and funeral-chant, ‘Lyke Wake Dirge’:

A brief article on the Medieval genre of the Danse Macabre and a poem titled by the same name.

Lübecker Totentanz (Detail), Bernt Notke ~1463.

The Danse Macabre (French) or the Dance of
Death, was a genre of art that flourished in late-medieval Europe, in which
an allegorical motif of the inevitability and suddenness of death was expounded
in paintings, prints, songs and poems. The Danse Macabre involved figures
who were dead, or “personified Death summoning representatives from all walks
of life to dance along to the grave, typically with a pope, emperor, king,
child, and labourer.”[1] The
inclusion of people from all spheres of social and religious profiles
articulated the universality of death, which comes equally to all.

The Danse Macabre was a reminder of the immanence
of death, and were produced in various artistic forms – especially visual and
orally – “to remind people of the fragility of their lives,” the importance of
using the time one has for good before the judgement, “and how vain were the
glories of earthly life.”[2] Such
thoughts dominated mid to late medieval life, in the face of the Bubonic Plague
which killed up to a third of Europe’s population, and which resurfaced at
various intervals over the centuries in death casing bouts.

The dance of death itself, was also an allegory inciting
the acceptance of death in those whose souls abided in their mortal frames. Depictions
of this ‘dance’ sometimes played out literally in forms of dancing skeletons or
corpses, or conceptually by the fact of a dead figure seeking to awaken the
living to the music of eternity by means of accepting to dance with death – that
is, to adjust one’s steps in life in view of their mortality.

Detail of a miniature of the Three Living and the Three Dead, c. 1308 – c. 1340, Arundel MS 83.

The Three Living and the Three Dead was among the
most popular legends which was often depicted in varying accounts in the form
of frescos. Generally, the scene is portrayed where three young gentlemen on
horseback meet three cadavers who are sometimes described as their ancestors,
who warn them with the words: “Quod fuimus, estis; quod sumus, vos eritis” – “What
we were, you are; what we are, you will be.”[3]

The Danse Macabre is by no means an irrelevant
quirk of the past, since death remains as inevitably and universally apart of
life today as it did then. Our Medieval predecessors are often dismissed as
ignorant and superstitious; yet there is a superior wisdom that flourished in
the Medieval world – a wisdom that comes from the cognisance of death which
carries with it an awareness of the place of temporal goods and life, not as a
hedonistic end, but as a means towards something greater that demands us to
live ethically and prayerfully in stride with the transcendent. A rendering of Ecclesiastes
7:4 speaks of such wisdom: “He is wise who ponders his death”.

Hans Holbein Engraving, 1549.

In our own time it is necessary to stir up this wisdom shunned through a denial and fear of mortality. Or else it is pushed aside by its pseudo-counterpart that consists in a nihilistic despair that convinces itself death in and of itself gives meaning to life. Whereas if the grave is the final end, then it renders vain life itself, making its meaning no more than a construct passed down through a legacy that will likely be forgotten. Yet intrinsic and universal to the human heart are desires for eternal things - for endless happiness, relationship, and fulfillment. No intrinsically universal desire is an imaginary construct for non-existent realities. For just as the intrinsic thirst for water exists within us because water exists and we need it; likewise, the intrinsic thirst for eternity exists within us because eternity is real and we were made for it. The Danse Macabre imparts this wisdom which consistsin reminding us of our mortality, but always in view of our eternity.

It seems pertinent to bring back from the grave of the past the Danse Macabre and to carry
on in this tradition, by formulating our own like-imageries of faith. For through such frescoes, which above all must be painted on the ceiling of our minds, God sacramentally
invites us to the dance with death – with the selflessness of the Cross. A dance of resignation, acceptance, and delight, through which we come to enter into the mystery of eternal life, because by dancing with the Cross of Death we dance with
Christ who says of Himself “I am the resurrection and the life.” (Jn 11:25).

The following poem is written in light of the tradition
of the Danse Macabre.